Presently, the conventional approach implements an identifier (ID) by way of electrically blow able fuses (referred to as eFUSEs). It is known in the art, that such IDs are not secure because the eFUSE ID bits can be easily detected by de-layering the chip.
Several methodologies, mechanisms, and systems can be employed to allow intrinsic features of a computer chip or integrated circuit (IC) to be used to generate one or more unique and difficult to replicate IDs corresponding to the chip or IC, particularly when determining a unique intrinsic ID. This approach is known as Physical-Unclonable-Fuse (PUF).
Generally, the challenge of using PUF-based ID approaches resides in providing the intrinsic ID function that generates the PUF ID while resulting in stable generation. Stable PUF generation has been found to be a difficult task.
In order to overcome the stated problem, PUFs require various testing procedures during PUF generation to eliminate unstable PUF bits.
Therefore, PUFs requiring fuzzy match detection during PUF authentication make it possible to authenticate the chip even with unstable PUF bits. An implementation of determining a unique intrinsic ID of a chip with fuzzy match detection has been attempted. However, this approach has been found to increase the system overhead.
Self-authenticating chip architecture has been found to reduce significantly the system overhead over the conventional fuzzy match detection approach. However, even with this approach, the system and chip overhead is still large, and therefore employing this approach for low cost system such as consumer market is not suitable.
Accordingly, the reliability of self-identifying chips has become a necessity in contemporary security and encryption applications. However the existing self-authentication approach using PUF as a secret key is still not cost effective. Therefore, it would be beneficial to create a secret key storage without using PUF for chip identification.
More particularly, fabless semiconductor design entities require an industry capable of achieving a cost-effective solution to internal and external IC clients that provides chip authentication and identification with minimal design and area overhead. The solution requires further a minimum amount of additional circuitry or mask levels on the chip, and sufficiently simple that they do not impact the yield, and it being adaptable to a broad range of products.